It has been 10 years since Elizabeth Moore has spoken publicly about her years as the pretty, public face of Canada’s neo-Nazi Heritage Front.

Then came Charlottesville.

“I know what these people are feeling. I know how powerful hate is,” Moore says from her Toronto home. Now “older than 40”, married to a Jewish lawyer and mother of a young daughter, Moore said she was terrified watching the violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., where tiki-torch-bearing white nationalists marched and chanted Nazi-era slogans.

“This was my life back in the ’90s, and with all that’s going on it seems everything old is new again,” she said. “Of course, in the ’90s we didn’t have a president of the United States who seemed sympathetic.”

Moore was a student in a racially diverse high school in Scarborough, Ont., in the early 1990s when she fell under the spell of the Heritage Front. The group was founded in 1989 by a group of Nazi-sympathizers who espoused racist, white supremacist views.

In 1993, two of the Heritage Front’s charismatic leaders, Wolfgang Droege and George Burdi, the singer in a band called RaHoWa (Racial Holy War), were at the forefront of a riot in Ottawa in which 200 neo-Nazis marched through Ottawa shouting “Sieg Heil’ and giving Nazi salutes.

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Moore felt alienated in her school where she was often the only white student in the class. There were rich kids from Hong Kong who arrived at school in their own sports cars, alongside impoverished Jamaicans who lived in public housing.

“There was a lot of resentment for a lot of reasons. And being a white kid, I was caught in that. Nobody seemed to have any answers for me,” Moore said.

“I’d hear from one side, ‘My mom won’t let me be friends with white kids because white kids are lazy.’ And I’d hear from the other side, ‘I’m not going to be friends with you because your ancestors were enslaving my ancestors.’ I didn’t know what to do with that. I was often the only white kid in my class. And no one could tell me how to navigate that until the Heritage Front showed up.”

Elizabeth Moore is pictured in 1999, about four years after leaving a neo-nazi group. In ’99, Moore was executive assistant to Sylvia Sweeney, right, president of the Blueprints Arts and Entertainment Festival at Jump Up City.Peter Redman

Moore met a boy in her class who shared Heritage Front literature with her. In the absence of other information, it seemed to offer answers.

“When you’re feeling disaffected for whatever reason, whether you’re from a broken home or whatever is going on in your life, and you embrace something that says, ‘All your problems are because of these people over here’ — there’s nothing more powerful than that,” she said.

“It’s like an instant elixir. It solves everything — or seems to.”

Moore’s parents were devastated by her choice. Her father had grown up in England during the Nazi Blitz.

“He was a little boy in World War Two, and his childhood consisted of having bombs fall on his head and his father die in the army. For him to have a daughter embrace neo-Nazism was probably the worst thing that could happen,” Moore said.

“I remember my mother telling me that it made her really sad. I remember feeling so enraged by that, that her telling me only made me more angry. Now when I look back on it, it breaks my heart.”

Moore was one of only two young women in Heritage Front so the group pushed her to be its spokeswoman, a role she embraced. By this time, she was studying at Queen’s University.

Then the doubts began. She discovered some of what she’d been told was untrue and began to question her actions and beliefs. Moore wasn’t at the Ottawa riot, but was told by Heritage Front leaders that the violence had been instigated by anti-racist counter protesters and that the media had been selectively editing footage to falsely blame the Heritage Front.

“I learned about ‘fake news’ 20 years before it became fashionable,” she jokes.

The turning point came at a party at the home of a sympathetic Heritage Front “den mother.” Moore looked critically at the group, some of them kids, some of them senior citizens.

“I realized that the only thing that any of us had in common was who we hate. And I realized I didn’t want my life to be about that. It was like a sudden flash: Oh, my God, I’m being lied to and this is what this is all about. I want out.

“Even being in this room and having that thought was frightening. They do not look kindly on those who leave the movement.”

Moore approached Bernie Farber, then head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, who was at Queen’s to deliver a lecture on hate groups and anti-Semitism. Over a series of meetings, the two began to trust each other. Farber taught Moore about the Holocaust and advised her to cut her ties to the Heritage Front completely and abruptly. She left the group in 1995.

Moore began to speak publicly about the dangers of neo-Nazism in Canada. Her experience was portrayed in White Lies, a 1998 fictionalized TV drama about a young girl who joins a ne0-Nazi group. She went on to finish her studies at Queen’s in English literature and feminist studies, and found work in the TV industry.

Looking back on those years is painful, she says.

“Of course it’s embarrassing that I fell for this nonsense. It’s highly embarrassing. But I see it happening over and over again. Whether it’s young people being recruited into ISIS or into white supremacist organizations. There’s so much extremism going on.

“I keep hearing, ‘Well, this person was such a nice, quiet person, they came from a good home,’ and, ‘How did this happen?’

“I know how it happened. I was that nice, quiet person who came from a good home.”

What could have prevented her from being seduced by the Heritage Front? It’s a difficult question to answer, she says.

“It would have been helpful if people had been a little more open about what was happening in the neighbourhood. I don’t mean validating racism, of course, but something that would have made it safe for me to say, ‘I’m confused about this.’ And to get a more nuanced answer than ‘multiculturalism is great.’

“OK, but I’m getting bullied at school and feeling left out, and just telling me that multiculturalism is great as a pat answer isn’t enough.”

The Heritage Front literature “was the only thing that was addressing the stresses and concerns I was experiencing at school. It was really unfortunate that there wasn’t anything else to listen to. That’s one reason I continue to speak out. I’d like to think that, over the years, I made a difference to some kids who were vulnerable to the message.”

As the wife of a Jewish man, Moore once seriously considered converting to Judaism, but eventually decided against it.

“I had this realization that I had to deal with being white. It’s probably the best thing that could have happened because I have to finish the thing that I started back in 1995 and confront the fact that it’s because I have all this white privilege that I was able to live a life of hatred.”

When she sees the Charlottesville marchers, she sees people who are like she used to be — alienated and disaffected.

“People like me, we were people who were searching for something. And for a while we found that sense of belonging and a sense of empowerment in the neo-Nazi movement. Obviously it’s a false power,” she said. “It’s not real.”

And she knows, as well, she can’t stay silent.

“I feel like I’m being brought into this reluctantly,” she said. “I don’t want to be speaking about this. I feel like there’s other things in my life I’d like to turn my attention to. But right now it feels like it’s all hands on deck. If you have knowledge to share, you have responsibility to share it.”

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